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Do We Need Realism In Video Games?

I would play this if it were a game. In fact, I would prefer to play a game with unrealistic looking graphics like this if the game was fun and the combat engaging, than a game with realistic faces and poor gameplay. I doubt I’m alone.

Is the quest for realism a waste of time? Do we spend too much time trying to soar Evil Kenevil style over the Uncanny Valley when instead we ought to be focusing on what makes games tick?

When we watch a Pixar film, we aren’t docking points for unrealistic human faces. Mr. Incredible is enjoyable precisely because of his outsize proportions, but none of the characters in The Incredibles is realistically built. Their eyes are too big. Their heads are shaped funny. They’re not realistic, and we don’t care.

Contrast this with animated films that have tried to cross the Uncanny Valley. Think of Beowulf and its nightmarishly human-like visages.

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“Do we spend too much time trying to soar Evil Kenevil style over the Uncanny Valley when instead we ought to be focusing on what makes games tick?”

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Yes.

Kind of a short answer.

The fact is that games developers, and of course those making the platforms games run on, have had this nasty tendency to use graphics as the selling points. In fact they’ve been doing this for a long time – as long as I can remember…and I used to have a Spectrum 48k. (Jesus, now I feel old…).

At one point this was understandable, after all we jumped from 8 colours to several thousand in less than a decade. So highlighting the advances in gaming technology through the graphics was the smart thing to do. Today however developers seem to be concentrating on graphics to the detriment of everything else. Much the same happened in the early to mid 1990′s, and it didn’t do the industry any favours back then – consider that one of the most successful games platform of the early 1990′s was the gameboy not the high-graphics consoles.

I admit, I like nice-looking graphics. I’m all for lush forests and beautiful lighting and wicked physics engines. I just don’t need it to be realistic. I don’t care about that at all, and the attempt is often too jarring.

I think the key is not to have ‘real world realism’, but rather a ‘realism’ that fits with the game and its setting.

The graphics for World of Warcraft, for example, are rather basic by modern standards. But they fit wonderfully into the game world – indeed I’ve only heard a single person state that the graphics were the reason they didn’t like the game.

One large problem that I have as a (former) game player is that the games coming to market are mostly about stunning graphics to the detriment of the game strategy. If a game’s strategy is weak, lame, then there will not be the player following, interest or craze as other games like Everquest have.

I don’t see why you would want to restrict game development to one form of progress over the other. I think it depends on the message you want to get across to the audience. Do you think Saving Private Ryan would have got it’s message(s) across if they did pixar style animation?

There is room for advancements in all directions, to say you don’t think people should bother because YOU don’t know how it would work…well, that just doesn’t seem right.

Graphics do matter, but the problem is most game developers are missing the point when they try and make their games hyper-realistic. Games don’t take place in the real world, because the real world has really lame rules. No one would play Call of Duty if it were really true to real combat, because real combat is horrific, scarring, and disgusting, and when it isn’t any of those things, its usually boring as hell. Similarly, there are places of immense natural beauty in the world, and there are impressive feats of human artifice. But most of the world is somewhat grimy and unimpressive. If you just blindly copy that, the result might be very realistic, but that just means its very realistically boring. The joy of games is that you get to break those rules for a while and live in a world where you are not bound by realistic conventions.

The rules of thumb is this: games do not need to be realistic to have good graphics. They need to be 1. DETAILED, 2. CONSISTENT, 3. IMMERSIVE.

My two favorite examples of this concept are Zelda: Wind Waker, and the original Fable. In Wind Waker, it obvious why its done right. Nothing in WW looks realistic, but it is extremely detailed for its time, right down to currents in the water and particulate matter blowing in the wind. And its consistent, rendering every part of it’s cell-shaded glory believable because it all follows the same design rules even though the actual places vary wildly in content.

Fable is a more complicated example, but perhaps the more potent one. Fable could have looked hyper-realistic (at least for the time) but that would have ruined the experience. Each area was detailed as hell, from the autumn beauty of the Greatwood to the frozen docks of Hook Coast and the pine forests of Knothole Glade. Each town was arranged in a way that made sense, but it never lost its design philosophy. This was a world wrapped in magic and monsters that have no place in the real world. It used just enough realistic graphics to bring you in, make you comfortable that you knew the rules the world operated by, and then started bending those rules for interesting effects.

Fable was detailed, pushing the hardware of the time close to its limits, and it still looks good today. But it didn’t bother to render the nose-hairs of the people, instead focusing on adding more rich detail to the world to draw your interest. It focused on making itself look good, and if realism did not do enough, then it left it behind and just make it interesting and cool. It stayed consistent with its design ideals, and made a world that looked like one whole place rather than just a collection of areas to walk through. For all its faults, Fable remains one of my favorite games of that generation just because it was so successful in making Albion feel like a real place without having to use hyper realistic graphics.